The 10 scariest post-apocalyptic movies

The environmentally conscious plot of this early favorite by Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away) involves a young girl trying to bring peace to her post-apocalyptic society and halt the spread of polluted wastelands.

If you’re one of the unlucky leftovers of World War IV, it’ll help to own a telepathic pooch like Blood (played by The Brady Bunch’s Tiger) to sniff out food, foes and potential mates.

After a new ice age begins, humanity survives on a perpetually cruising luxury rail, teetering around the high-altitude curves of a dead world. Sprung from a 1982 French graphic novel (and bearing its era’s trickle-down tensions), Snowpiercer is a headlong rush into conceptual lunacy.

Fine, so your home is a shopping cart and you haven’t showered in years. If you’ve got Lord of the Rings’ Viggo Mortensen as your fiercely protective dad, you’re going to make it just fine.

Michael Bay would sneer at Michael Haneke’s post-apocalyptic vision, with nary a catastrophe in sight. But Isabelle Huppert, cutting her way through the unspoiled French countryside with flaming torch and two kids in tow, makes the whole enterprise absorbing—a primitive test of motherhood shorn of alarmist politics or moralizing.

If there is such a thing as a perfect action movie, expertly paced and acted, cynical yet rousing, George Miller’s post-apocalyptic thrill ride is it. Aggressively kinetic, these vehicular stunts have never been equaled.

Watch the little boy from Witness waste away from radiation sickness. Lynne Littman’s harrowing drama is about a suburb trying to keep up appearances after the bombs fall. Stubbornly, the residents cling to the vestiges of civilization, including a school play of “The Pied Piper,” which gets performed during a devastating climax.

Zombies overrun our cities, and civilization has fallen. Sounds like a perfect time to head to the mall. George A. Romero’s satire of consumerism has no equal.

Make sure your bunker has room for the title character—a crazy scientist who, nonetheless, has a plan to keep going. More than half a century after Stanley Kubrick unleashed his most perverse provocation, it’s amazing that we’re even here to enjoy it.

Chris Marker’s 28-minute short manages to tell a tale of nuclear holocaust, sci-fi time travel and heartbreaking romance using only still photographs and narration. The movie’s ideas are so poetic, so utterly radical, it was remade by Terry Gilliam into Twelve Monkeys.